Of course we had much fun decorating them, too. The brown sugar and nutmeg cookies turned out fantastically. The dough was especially good. We simply took a basic sugar cookie recipe from the Betty Crocker cookbook and substituted half of the sugar called for with brown sugar, and grated a boatload of nutmeg into it.
We were out of dark brown sugar so we added a little molassas to the light brown. That didn't work out quite as well as hoped; the molassas formed little sticky balls, which were impervious to fork mixing. Next time I have to improvise some dark brown, I will try the food processor or blender. However, with persistent hand mixing, almost all of the lumps disappeared. Of course, all of this would have been a piece of cake--er, cookie--if I had a Kitchenaid stand mixer (hint hint to anyone interested in giving me a $200 present in the near future.)
Our next batch was a deluxe sugar cookie, also from Betty Crocker. We followed the recipe exactly, except we left out the almond extract and replaced it with extra vanilla. As an aside: I was recently made aware by my friend Dana's mother that there exists something called vanilla bean paste. They have it at Trader Joe's and it can be used as a substitute for vanilla pods in a recipe. I think these deluxe sugar cookies would be fantastic with the vanilla bean paste--it would lend a really intense vanilla flavor, and those little vanilla seeds would be so pretty peppering the pale sugar cookies.
But alas, we had no vanilla bean paste, so vanilla extract would have to do. Still tasty. This recipe was different from any I had tried before, in that it called for confectioner's sugar instead of granulated. What could be so special about confectioner's sugar, we wondered? As soon as we took a taste of that dough, we knew. This was very, very special. It was like biting into a cloud. A sugar cloud. A sugar butter cloud.
Then we made cookie art. Kaitlyn, artistic genius that she is, decorated a cookie to look like a cupcake. Let me repeat: a cookie decorated to look like a cupcake. Does it get any cuter than that?
Le sigh. Kaitlyn also made a hot air balloon and several more abstractly decorated ones.
I made a Dia de los Muertos skull, a yin yang, and a starburst.
C'est magnifique. I can attest that the cookies, when actually cooked, were scrumptious. (Fortunately we managed to eat some of them despite having to fend off my vulture brother.) All in all, we had a lovely New Year's late night baking and decorating delicious cookies. (Recipes are available upon request.)
Happy 2011 everyone!
